Does one sometimes also use exposure compensation on incident metering?

markjwyatt said:

Kodak and others have come under attack for being racist because of the way skin tones came out (https://petapixel.com/2015/09/19/he...lm-was-originally-biased-toward-white-people/ , https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/jan/25/racism-colour-photography-exhibition ) for different skin colorings. I am kind of curious (from a positive sense) about what filters work best with which skin tones for B&W photography. The recommendations used to include medG for Caucasian to darken skin tones a little; blue was considered good for men (probably Caucasian) to bring out "character" (generally not for women- that was the rule; a diffusor was preferred- but that is a cultural artifact). What about black, East Indian, darker Hispanic, indigenous American, various Asian, etc.? Then the cultural factors come in. How do they want to be portrayed? If it is candid, and not portraiture, how would you want to portray them (not just in terms of lightness/darkness, but also diffusion vs. sharp)? I tend to like to portray anything/one I shoot as they look naturally to the eye, but this is in itself tricky, especially in high dynamic range lighting conditions.

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I really don't want to get into arguments about arcane issues Mark, in my experience I find that both modern Kodak and Fuji professional color negative films, providing the exposure is modified correctly for the lightness and darkness of the skin tones of the sitter give excellent results that people are very pleased with.
It's a long time since I shot black people on transparency film, and can't really comment on the currently available films in that respect, but I can't remember ever having any problems on Fuji Astia100 or Agfa 50S that I used to use in those days.

benjiboy said:

You really are getting your exposures wrong.

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No, I am talking about in real life, not in photographs.

One exposes one's film in order to obtain the results one wants.
If one uses negative film, it makes sense to factor in the additional controls available at the printing stage if one is dealing with a subject whose range of luminance is challenging.
If one is using positive film, one should key their exposure to make sure that the luminance one is most concerned with renders the way one wants it to (sometimes at the expense of other parts of the image.
A subject with both a large Subject Luminance Range and very important dark tones, will often require a different exposure with positive film than with negative film.
The same applies to a subject with both a large Subject Luminance Range and very important light tones.

The only compensation for incidental lightmeter readings I make is with transparency films, I make is half a stop more for exceptionally dark subjects, and half a stop less for exceptionally light subjects.

Almost a year ago I noticed a situation, where an incident reading would have been off by around a stop:

Taking an image of a landscape from an elevated spot. There were agricultural fields, some with flowering rapeseed. It was a sunny day and the sun quite high up.

Metering horizontally towards the camera would have overexposed. The high angle ilumination lit up the landscape so much that one had to meter towards the sun to account for it. How did I notice? The built in meter of my Rolleiflex SLX gave the correct metering.

Normally I trust the external incident reading over the reflective metering of the camera (and usually don't even take a reading with the camera). The camera meter is acutally really good, but it underexposes when there are specular highlights. IMHO, at least.

But in this case it was logical that the dome will miss out on light, with the meter held horizontally. I had slide film loaded, probably Velvia 50. And the developed film proved that I made the right call. One stop (at least, IIRC) of overexposure would have ruined the image.

If using negative film, if there are deep shadows in the scene, I might give a bit more exposure than the incident meter says, knowing that film handles over-exposure well. I find incident meters handy for snow scenes.

In cinema, they use this technique called "day for night" where they shoot a scene in the daytime and. in post, darken it so look as though was shot at night. This was used in the Wim Wender film "Kings of the Road". Let's say one is shooting a scene at dusk or in a shadowy building. If one used the straight incident meter reading it might result in a large part of the scene having a low-density exposure where the film doesn't perform the best. If one wasn't worried about blowing out highlights, might it sense to expose more than the incident meter says resulting in a negative that looks brighter than the original scene, but which can be adjusted in post to look darker?